Bitcoin and quantum computing

Basically you'd have to relax the trust/decentralization guarantees, but you don't have to relax them all the way. Most likely a consortium of trusted actors (Blockstream, major miners, major exchanges, bitcoin-adjacent companies,...). Or something like a consensus mechanism with aligned incentives a la Kleros. I think "we" could come up with "something", even if it is not perfect, because the value of Bitcoin is ultimately in the community of people who use Bitcoin, not just the protocol.

"Hard-fork" might not be the right way to see this. It's more like starting a completely new protocol where people who held Bitcoin at a certain snapshot can redeem a one-time airdrop equivalent to the value they held, provided they can prove ownership. As that protocol's value overtakes the value of the original Bitcoin chain (which will eventually be completely dead), we can all agree to call it Bitcoin.

I meant to refer specifically to the trespass theory (advocated about 25-30 years ago by some companies as a way to enforce terms of service) as a reason one might attempt to distinguish "changing a number on company X's computer" from "changing a number in a distributed database". That is, there might be legal theories that are more protective of individual companies' computers just because the physical computers belong to the companies as opposed to information-in-general.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trespass_to_chattels#Early_app...

However, other forms of computer crime law can protect information-in-general, regardless of where it's stored or by whom.

My point was that existing laws have been happy to punish changing numbers on computers based on the meanings that those numbers have to people, what people act as though those numbers represent. I believe some of these laws are drafted broadly enough that they already treat stealing cryptocurrency as illegal. Even if legislators didn't consciously regulate it this way, courts may conclude that concepts of fraud, property, conversion, etc., already apply to cryptocurrency systems, even if there isn't an obvious technical difference between a transfer intentionally authorized by a human owner and a transfer authorized as a result of fraud, hacking, bugs, etc.

I understand that in, say, Bitcoin, "ownership" of assets stored in a UTXO is implemented only as the ability to cause a transaction that consumes that UTXO, and that this ability doesn't refer to a person's name or identity, or to good or evil, or to the reason that someone caused such a transaction, or to how someone came to possess the necessary information to create it. The blockchain consensus is updated based on whether the transaction followed certain deterministic rules, and concepts like "the owner" do not in fact appear directly anywhere in those rules. However, this doesn't stop a court from saying that some such transactions represent fraud or conversion or something while others don't, even though the transactions in question were equally valid according to the blockchain consensus.

I understand that there's uncertainty and debate in the cryptocurrency world about how we should want legal systems to regulate or not regulate cryptocurrency, remedy or not remedy otherwise-wrongful actions committed via cryptocurrency systems, and enforce or not enforce agreements implemented in or through cryptocurrencies. I also think you're right to point out that there's an issue about whether the content or behavior of the code is, or is meant to be, the "entire agreement" among parties using it, or whether it just somehow reflects other kinds of relationships that are also partly enforced by legal systems.

I currently work on smart contracts for a living. I find the question of how legal systems should view them fascinating, and I don't have a clearly articulated position on it.

Edit: I'd again like to point to Kremen v. Cohen as an analogy. In that case there was a privately (sort of) created database of domain name registrations. There weren't specific laws or regulations created to describe how the courts should view domain name ownership. The defendant in that case fraudulently caused a domain name to be transferred from the plaintiff to the defendant. The courts agreed that the domain name was "property" and that the defendant could be sued for this, again even though there was no specific legislation regulating the domain name industry. Now, many people are unhappy about various ways that the legal systems of various countries try to control and regulate domain name ownership and transfer. I know people who've worked on naming systems that are explicitly meant to be harder for governments to regulate.

Still, when courts looked at the original DNS decades ago, none of these forms of queasiness about the government's role stopped the courts from concluding that domain names were property based on their characteristics and use, and that people could be sued for fraudulently taking domain names away from other people.

It seems like you might be perceiving a kind of hypocrisy in the notion of people wanting to deliberately create things that are harder to regulate, and then still sometimes involving the courts in disputes over them.

Actually we have real world examples of this very sort of thing: someone stealing cryptocurrency from a government agency seizure using the publicly knowable private keys for a wallet. No quantum computer was even involved, just plain old human error.

In South Korea this year, a government agency released pictures of a physical seizure that included written down mnemonic seed phrase.

The funds were then stolen, using that seed phrase.

And then:

> A Korean National Police Agency official said at a press briefing on the 3rd that "the first thief submitted a confession to the Cybercrime Reporting System on the 28th of last month, so on the 1st we arrested the person based on that and are tracking the secondary thief."

https://biz.chosun.com/en/en-society/2026/03/03/2HRCGVESIZBT...

So there you have it. The government in South Korea considered this a theft. An arrest was made. Investigations were made.

It is so very obvious that this is what would happen when you steal cryptocurrency from the government. Even when the government agency itself was the one to accidentally publish the private keys so that they became public knowledge.